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Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Story Realms Preview: Adventuring Kits Part 3

All this
week, we are previewing Adventuring Kits from our upcoming storytelling adventure
game, Story Realms. In Part 1 and Part 2
of our preview, we revealed the Wanderer Kit, the Wizard Kit, and the Healer
Kit. Today, we bring you the Mischief
Kit!

As you can
see, this kit allows you to get yourself into a wide range of trouble. Whether it’s playing games, playing tricks,
or just breaking and entering, this Adventuring Kit has got you covered. Now to be clear, Story Realms is not a game
of moral ambiguity. The players are
always the heroes and their goal is always to save the day. The Mischief Kit isn’t really meant to facilitate
felonious skullduggery. Instead, it’s
the gear for the heroes that like to avoid charging into battle and would
rather overcome a challenge with a little deception or playful trickery.

How This
Stuff Works

Seeing these
Adventuring Kits and their eclectic assortment of items might make a person
wonder what the specific rules are about how these items work. The short answer is: they just do. Outside of the images and the names of the
items on these cards, the game does not provide any detailed rules about what you
are supposed to do with them. For an
experience gamer, this may seem shocking and a bit uncomfortable. All I can say is that we’ve been playtesting
and it simply just works. Story Realms
provides the players with challenges that encourage the player to come up with
creative solutions. The items in an
Adventuring Kit are kind of idea starters.
They help shape the type of actions the player will decide to take. Think about it, do you really need lengthy
rules to tell you what happens when you throw a smoke bomb? I’m guessing you probably know that it lands
and makes a lot of smoke. This probably
makes it hard to see. Maybe it could
even cause someone to cough and hack a bit.
The Storyteller and the players are free to interpret the use of an item
as they see fit and describe its effects in whatever way best suits the story.

I must,
however, admit that in our last preview I told a little white lie. I said that every rule you needed to know
about the items in an Adventuring Kit was right there on the card. That’s not actually true. There are no detailed rules to describe the function of each individual item. However, there is one rule, not written on the cards,
you need to know about how all of these items work.

The Right
Tool for the Job

The reason
that the game doesn’t worry too much about specific rules for an item is that
any heroic use of an item in your Adventuring Kit is tied to a Skill Roll. Which Skill you use depends on what exactly
you are trying to do. We’ll talk more
about skills on a later preview, but for now just know that there are only six skills
and each skill has a certain number of dice you get to roll (1, 2, or 3
specifically) to try to accomplish your goal.
If you use an item from your Adventuring Kit that is appropriate to the
task you are trying to do, that’s called having “The Right Tool for the Job”
and you get to roll 1 extra die.

Trying to
escape a horde of monsters? Smoke Bombs
make for a good getaway! That’s +1 die
to your Move Roll. Have to pry open a
locked door? Crowbars are good for
prying open things. That’s +1 die to
your Might Roll. In this way, the game
gives a simple but effective way that items in an Adventuring Kit can have a real
impact. Remember that Story Realms also
gives players access to powerful magical artifacts that DO have unique rules
and strange powers (printed on the item card), but that’s not the purpose of
Adventuring Kits. Adventuring Kits are
simply the fun and creative tools players can use to aid any task they might
try.

Why not have
more swords and armor and traditional stuff?

You may
notice that while our Adventuring Kits are filled with fun and interesting
items, they don’t have as much of the mundane, traditional adventuring gear
that you might see in other games. If
you're curious about exactly what went in to choosing these types of items, you
should check back in later this week where we will talk about the philosophy
behind the Adventuring Kits and reveal a few design goals you can see at work
across the entire game.